letter 018: a fitting room for dinosaur paws

dear junk mail club,

recommended listening: so here we are - bloc party

i’m not sure what to say. yesterday i didn’t speak to anyone out loud. it was one of the longest days i’ve had in so long. multiple plans fell through and it was one of those where you are just dying for it to be nighttime so that you can start over the next morning. i’m not sure why the idea of morning gives you the illusion of a new chance. you can’t just decide to restart in the middle. and maybe, you could. and i’m wishing you luck. i’m not so good at that, at least not on my own.

portrait by chris emond and another by myself. stickers from a lifelong friend :) january 2023. 35mm.

i’ve been fascinated by the idea of strangers watching the sunset together for years. i like to think about how many times i’ve possibly watched the sun go down with a repeated stranger next to me and never known. the obsession humans have with the sunset, although as far as we have ever existed, it will do it again tomorrow. and tomorrow’s tomorrow, too. but without fail, everyone stops what they are doing at the beach and faces west to countdown the last glimpses of light together. so many outings are planned around sundown — picnics, walks, drives, the right album to play, the right person to be with. i’ve traveled great distances and to specific locations and lookouts to get a different perspective on the same thing. 

maybe it’s the predictability of the sunset that provides comfort, but ironically the uniqueness that draws me in. often i think it’ll be a drab one, only for it to surprise me with a pink blanketed ceiling that fades into the blue. that might be my favorite color of all time, that solemn blue before night. maybe it’s because sunset is one of the few certainties of everyday. i can count on it. it’s reliable. i can look forward to it and not be let down. i wonder how many of you i may have unknowingly paused to watch the sunset with in my life. if any, at all. there is surely several strangers i frequent often at my favorite spots for the sunset that i’ll never meet. and we will never know what the other is visiting that hour with, but we gather all for the same reason. we watch it go and then we split. i like the fact that it’s us who are actually turning away from the sun, not the sun running from us, dipping under the horizon until tomorrow’s rise. although, now that i think about it, the thought of sunrise never crosses my mind when i’m absorbed with its setting. and that lack of thought about tomorrow maybe is part of its whole appeal.

photos from fazerdaze shows. thank you amelia <3 for letting us play with you. november 2022. misc receipts, stamps, coins, and 35mm.

there’s a novel’s worth of stories i could tell from my time in new zealand. the first question people always ask when i see them is, “how was new zealand?” — and i can’t blame them, i would do the same. to be fair, i have done the same to all my friends who have come back from studying abroad. by now i’ve mastered the short form summary. i have my script rehearsed and ready. succinct and concise. honest, but grateful. sometimes a little anecdote here and there if the conversation permits. but that’s not the version of the story i want to tell you.

miscellaneous photos of friends from nz. november, 2022. 35mm.

as expected on any length of travel, there were some ups and downs across my five weeks in “the land of the long white cloud” — that’s what the maori name for new zealand, “aotearoa,” translates to. i actually had quite a difficult time in the beginning. the first three weeks of my trip were plagued by rain storms so we weren’t able to venture outside the city as much as i had dreamed of, and unfortunately i got fairly sick to the point i had to use my traveler’s health insurance (thank you mom for getting me that) to get on medication. home began to feel very far away. i had built up an idea of how i wanted the trip to go, and it was veering a ways off of that ideal. my experiences versus my expectations began to weigh on me. i realized i was ruining the trip for myself somewhat because of that thought process. i was letting myself down. and i decided to let go of what i’d been holding onto too tightly, and take it exactly for what it was. before i knew it, new zealand began to feel like a second home. 

i’m so appreciative of the friends who housed me, cooked me dinners, drove me around, and introduced me to their friends who then became my own. if there’s one thing i noticed the most when i was there, it was the hospitality and kindness of the people. not even specifically to me, but just everywhere and to everyone. no one rushes a conversation off, you can hold a fifteen minute conversation with a cashier at a corner store if you’d like and they’d be more than happy to have it. the most shocking, maybe coming from LA is that people let you in when driving. no one is out there cutting people off or avoiding eye contact so you can’t merge. it’s a paradise.

a night in rangiwahia. wine, chess, a 90s dance mix, and a bad comedy. november 22, 2022. 35mm.

some days i’d pause on a walk and just stare at how picturesque the overgrown sidewalk looked, and question why that mattered to me at all. i miss a lot of the street corners, and the familiarity i began to have at certain intersections, knowing where i was on that side of the world. i’d come so far. at the beginning of the trip, just having my eyes open was too overwhelming. every single thing about it was different, the car brands, the signage, the terminology, the accent, the side of the road you drive on, the streetlights, the concrete itself, the crosswalk signal (theirs is literally an animated guy walking, it is awesome), the trees, the roofing of the buildings, the powerlines. it all gave me a headache at first, but now i had found comfortability. i no longer feared the foreignness of it all and began to want to remember every single detail.

every green grass hill is a dinosaur spine sleeping under a big blue sky, waiting for the clouds to take their shape and for us to point them out. mt. eden. december, 2022. 35mm.

i would get all excited about the most random things it was throwing everybody off. for example, we would be on a road trip down the north island for hours in the car and periodically throughout the drive i would just scream from the backseat pointing out the window. and the whole car would be flustered, thinking i had spotted something crazy out on the side of the road like a car on fire. and to their let down, all i was yelling about were the rolling green grass hills, polka-dotted with sheep up and down them. i’d never seen something so pretty. it just looked so perfect to me. it’s interesting, traveling to new places and being surprised at the things you fall in love with that are so average to someone else who calls that place home. 

i became so enthralled by the variance in mailboxes compared to the ones back here in the states. our traditional mailbox shape there is a rarity. they’ve got these triangular shaped ones, and these odd holes in the tops, and on nearly every mailbox they had these “no junk mail” plaques. so of course, that made me smile. no junk mail club allowed in new zealand. thankfully, i made it back here before writing this one :)

you go for another walk. this time you turn right instead of left. you lead yourself to a crooked staircase that points you down a tunnel of trees and towards the sun. today’s been the hottest day of them all. you convince yourself you have a fever because you forgot what summer heat feels like after all this rain. you come across the perfect set of mailboxes parked in front of a blue wall. a collage set of best friends. you always take notes of all the ones you like. two teenagers glare at you as your feet crackle in the wood chips and they spill what stories they have good enough to tell to each other so far on the merry-go-round. you take too long to find the right place to sit. you always do. finally, next to the singular flower in the field. you watch it sway in the wind and hope your legs don’t get itchy. a monarch circles the tree in front of you and a bluebird sweeps through the air to draw your attention, showing off its speed before departing to leave room for the train that rattles between the patterned roofs, and you think back to your early days here, riding into the city for the first time. it all floods in at once and you remember the tall golden grasses at the top of the hill, and losing your voice screaming at paddocks at the top of your lungs, picking cow poop out of your corduroy’s, and deciding you want a rose garden when you grow up. you remember “the best night out in auckland that soap bar has ever had” and how you got to witness, “nothing beats welly on a good day.” your heart grew soft for a balcony view, and you watched your team lose on an all-nighter. tomorrow we’ll part again, and i’ll try to be brave as i close my eyes. november-december, 2022. 35mm.

it’s been over three months since the last letter when i had just returned from new york, and i won’t even begin to try to sandwich everything from that time span into this singular letter. some letters are better left unsent. some feelings have passed and new ones have taken their place. some feelings have lingered and stubbornly chugged alongside me even as i’ve tried to bat them away. while i try to keep these letters as transparent as possible, i keep a lot just for me. as of late, i’m not sure how i feel, or what to feel. i feel as if the feelings i have aren’t the right ones. feel. feeling. feelings. so much of that word. gross. i’m doing okay, though. finding my feet again. 

at the elementary school playground near the house i grew up at, there were these hand imprints of all different sizes under the slide. some were dinosaur paws, some other animals. in grade school, i’d crawl under there and see which size my hand fit into, twisting and stretching my fingers to find the perfect one. as i got older, i kept doing this and slowly i’d grow out of certain ones and fall seamlessly into the next. where i am right now is somewhere in between those imprints. no matter how i form my knuckles and squish my fingertips, i’m no longer the hand i’d been previously, but no matter how much i stretch out my fingers i also don’t quite reach the edges of the next. but i’m here all the same.

self portrait and pillowcase. january 7, 2023. 35mm.

i’ve been staying busy, inspired by the idea of how little i know. i barely know anything and that’s so indescribably exciting to me. the amount that i don’t know that’s out there waiting for me to find — that’s so freeing. so many films, albums, books, people to learn about. getting obsessed for short phases over things is one of my favorite things to do. it’s somewhat like having a crush where it’s fun just to feel the rush of it all, the novelty, and the possibility of more. i’ve finally gotten in the routine of reading for the first time in my life. this moment has been a long time coming. i think this time it’s gonna stick. the other day i bought a donut, drove to the beach in the pouring rain and sat there in my car reading for hours. if you had told younger me that i would become a reader, he would’ve run away scared. 

i wish i could go back to that playground and see what dinosaur paw i’d fit in now, but as life goes, that schoolyard no longer exists. it’s been totally demolished and rebuilt, so i guess we’ll never know.

wishing you nothing but the best.

your friend,

garry